Seems like the city has gone back to the primitive days
KARACHI: It seems like Karachi is becoming a city with lots of problems. As if street crimes, electricity load-shedding and the anti-encroachment drive were not enough, the city is facing another problem that was perhaps once limited to the province of Punjab — the load-shedding of gas.
On December 15, many areas of Karachi such as North Naziabad and Buffer Zone suffered gas load-shedding for more than two hours. People residing in these areas struggled to make food for their families. Considering that they also faced electricity load-shedding during the same time, some of them had to resort to the age-old ways of cooking with firewood. Seems like the city has gone back to the primitive days.
This is a cause for concern in the case of a metropolitan city that hosts more than 20 million of the country’s population with a growing middle class who reside in the neighbourhoods located on ‘the other side of the bridge’. Doubtless is the fact that city planners had failed to estimate how huge Karachi’s population would one day become and, hence, had not strategically planned the metropolis. But today, this lack of foresight is acting as a hurdle for many of the residents of Karachi.
Immediate steps have to be taken by the provincial government, being run by the PPP, to curb this problem. The population growth is not going to halt any time soon, as family planning is a still a far-fetched dream and the upward mobility of many from villages and less-developed cities of the country will only go on to increase.
Haroon Khalid
Published in The Express Tribune, December 16th, 2018.
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